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This study examines the extent to which students obtain postsecondary credentials in the career technical education (CTE) fields of focus they choose in high school. Using school fixed effects models, we find that focusing on a particular CTE field in high school is associated with an increased probability of enrolling and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field. The secondary-postsecondary relationship varies across focus areas, and it is strongest in health (increase of 12.5 percentage points), which is disproportionately chosen by females. Across all fields of focus, however, most students enroll and obtain a postsecondary credential in fields that are different from what they focused on in high school.

In this descriptive study, we use longitudinal student-level administrative records from 4 cohorts of high school graduates in Kentucky to examine the extent to which students persist and attain post-secondary credentials in the CTE fields of concentration they choose in high school. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to use student-level administrative data to examine how different fields of concentration in high school CTE are related to future postsecondary outcomes. We find that concentrating in a particular CTE field in high school is associated with both continuing on with that same field in college and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field; this relationship is especially strong in health fields and especially for women in health. The secondary-postsecondary connection is the weakest among students concentrating in occupational fields in high school, who are also the most disadvantaged socioeconomically and academically before high school. Despite the existence of secondary-postsecondary pipelines of career interests, most students enroll and obtain credentials in fields that are "different" from the field of concentration in high school. In addition, relative to students with similar pre-high-school achievement as measured by grades and test scores, we find that CTE concentration in high school is strongly associated with being more likely to enroll in a two-year college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college.

A number of school districts and states have implemented transition intervention programs designed to help high school students graduate ready for college. This study estimates the effectiveness of a transition program implemented statewide in Kentucky for high school seniors called Targeted Interventions (TI). Using 11 years of linked panel data, this study tracks the college progression of seven cohorts of students as they move from high school into college. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we estimate the program's impact on college credit attainment and transfer as well as the extent to which the program has helped reshape pathways through college. We find that the TI program significantly increased the likelihood that students would take at least 15 credits during the first term in college, a key measure that has been shown to be predictive of college completion. These early effects, however, do not translate into statistically significant impacts on the likelihood of transfers from a 2-year to a 4-year college, or the likelihood of earning enough credits to graduate from college. We discuss some possible explanations for why the TI program did not lead to observable improvements in college transfer or credit accumulation.

This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high school based on their 11th grade ACT test scores. Using difference-in-regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs with seven cohorts of 11th grade students, we find that, for an average per-student cost of about $600, TI significantly reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial course in both 2- and 4-year postsecondary institutions by 5-10 percentage points in math and 3-4 percentage points in English. These effects are similar among students who are eligible for free-or reduced-price lunch, Black and Hispanic students, students with remediation needs in multiple subjects, and students in lower-performing schools. Evidence also shows that TI increases the likelihood that students enroll in and pass college math before the end of the first year by four percentage points in 4-year universities. However, little evidence exists for TI affecting credit accumulation or persistence.

Policies that require the use of information about student achievement to evaluate teacher performance are becoming increasingly common across the United States, but there is some question as to how or whether to use student test-based teacher evaluations when student assessments change. We bring empirical evidence to bear on this issue. Specifically, we examine how estimates of teacher value-added are influenced by assessment changes across 12 test transitions in two subjects and five states. In all of the math transitions we study, value-added measures from test change years and stable regime years are broadly similar in terms of their statistical properties and informational content. This is also true for "some" of the reading transitions; we do find, however, some cases in which an assessment change in reading meaningfully alters value-added measures. Our study directly informs contemporary policy debates about how to evaluate teachers when new assessments are introduced and provides a general analytic framework for examining employee evaluation policies in the face of changing evaluation metrics. [This paper was published in "Economics of Education Review" v62 p48-65 2018.]

Using administrative longitudinal data from five states, we study how value-added measures of teacher performance are affected by changes in state standards and assessments. We first document the stability of teachers' value-added rankings during transitions to new standard and assessment regimes and compare our findings to stability during stable standard and assessment regimes. We also examine the predictive validity of value-added estimates during nontransition years over transition-year student achievement. In most cases we find that measures of teacher value added are similarly stable in transition years and nontransition years. Moreover, there is no evidence that the level of disadvantage of students taught disproportionately influences teacher rankings in transition years relative to stable years. In the states we study, student achievement in math can consistently be forecasted accurately--although not perfectly--using value-added estimates for teachers during stable standards and assessment regimes. There was somewhat less consistency in reading, because we find cases where test transitions significantly reduced forecasting accuracy.